Day R Survival Guide, Tips and Tricks

Waking up unaware of what is going on, you see a war-torn battlefield, cities ravaged by something, and death all around you. You don’t remember anything, not even your name, but all you know is you must find out what has gone on. Armed with only your own feeble body, you must scavenge and scrounge for every little bit of resources that you need to continue crafting yourself survival gear, and soon protect yourself from the evils and dangers of the forsaken lands.

This RPG style game is reminiscent of games such as Fallout and Skyrim. As you travel around, you have hunger and thirst meters that will slowly rise, and fatigue meters and health meters that must be managed. To make sure you gain the most out of everything you do and to keep you alive the longest, here are some tips to keep yourself ahead of the game.

Day R Survival Guide

First, we’ll start with the basic concepts. To survive, you must be able to manage your hunger and thirst, as well as your fatigue. These three meters are you basic needs to survive. If you have too much of either of these, you may die, which is not advisable. So, here are some tips to ensure that you won’t end up dying of hunger or thirst.

Always have at least 2-3 articles of food on you. Always cooking and keeping food on you is important. For one, it means you will always be able to eat something and keep your hunger meter low. But, food does perish. For this reason, it’s actually better to keep the components on you and not make it unless you need it at that time. For instance, to make pasta, you need a container, clean water, and pasta bag. Instead of letting it spoil when you’re unsure when it will be eaten, just keep the components on you until you need to make it. A good alternative to cooking food is finding canned goods. Also, cooking will increase your cooking skill, meaning you’ll be able to produce better quality food to sate your hunger and thirst.

Stock up on as much clean water as possible. Clean water not only quenches your thirst, but is used for various things such as cooking and cleaning rags. For this reason, since it also doesn’t weigh a lot, stocking up on clean water is always a necessity. Do this by cleaning dirty water or boiling it, and cleaning toxic water with coal and the like. Making sure to always have at least 30-40 clean water is essential to surviving in the bad lands.

Make campfires and huts wherever you plan to sleep. Curing fatigue is time consuming. Literally. To relieve the fatigue meter, you must sleep for a certain amount of time. Now, you can relieve your fatigue with consumables such as tea or coffee, but the easiest way is to just lay down to sleep. Now, just sleeping will consume about 7-8 hours if you do not have anything helping you. To lower that amount of time taken, craft campfires and huts. Both can be made with simply wood, so that isn’t much of an issue. This is also nice if you plan to scavenge and forage within towns. Setting up a camp outside of town so you don’t gain radiation poisoning and setting up a base of operations is perfect. Huts allow you to rest quickly and efficiently, as well as keeping you from possible external threats.

Day R Survival Tips and Tricks

Now that we’ve talked about how to survive, next is how to make sure you win every battle you encounter. To ensure you win each battle, here are some helpful tactics and guides:

Specialize in a fighting style. When battling, there are two primary styles of fighting: ranged and melee. Both deal damage to your enemy (Obviously), but everything has durability issues. For this reason, keeping track of how fast a weapon can be dismantled and fall apart is essential. Melee is very easy to craft, but ranged is better later on when you gain such weapons as AK47s and other types of guns. Ranged weapons take much more resources to craft, though, so that means you must invest more into them. For that reason, specialize in melee weapons first, and then when you start gaining a plethora of resources, focus on ranged weapons. Specializing also has a secondary benefit. As you gain experience fighting, you gain levels in your choice of weapons. For this reason, only picking two certain weapons ensures you’ll gain the bulk of your experience into a funneled skill.

Sew your heart out. Sewing is the act of creating clothing and armor, as well as bags and externals. Out of all the extra skills available, sewing will ensure that you can craft your own armor, as well as creating things such as bags which increases your carrying weight. As you sew and break materials down, you will constantly be able to create better armor, giving your odds in a fight better chances.

Now, there is one final step that I wish to touch on. This point covers the general gameplay, or macro-play if you will. The point is this: Make a base camp outside every city, and scour every building available. Some people might find this tedious and say, “Well, you can always find it a city over.” But, since this is a levelling game, it is much more advantageous to stay in one area, completely ransack the place, use all those materials to gain levels, and then continue moving on. This way, you gain the most out of each city before moving on. To set up a base camp also means you can unload all your gear after scavenging, meaning you can come back to them to use it all up. For instance, carrying wood and other raw materials tends to weigh you down by several kilograms. But, if you are able to deposit said resources at your base camp right outside of the city, you can travel back and forth between those two, and utilize the materials that you’ve left at the camp as well as what is in your inventory, as your inventory cannot exceed 100% or else you will be unable to move. Your base camp should consist of: A hut, a campfire, and anything you do not need to scavenge. Always try to carry only the minimal amount of equipment necessary to survive to always have space to carry newly scavenged materials.

This has been my guide to Day R Survival. Did you find this helpful? Let us know in the comments below! Good luck, and happy surviving the horrors!

23 thoughts on “Day R Survival Guide, Tips and Tricks”

Hi and Aloha from Hawaii ! ! ! 🙂
This is a nice blog article on the game. I am not finding a whole lot out there. When I do find something, it is usually for later-game info for players who have gotten to Moscow, etc.

I have only been playing about a week, and started my free version over when I just finished the “Ice Breaker Ship” quest. My radiation/exhaustion was terrible, and so I decided to treat that game as my ‘warm up’, as I had been reading some few tips online about getting a motorcycle, carrying a bike or bike-cart combo and so on.

In my second game, I fared much better! I then decided to buy the premium, because I was playing every day a few hours and since I have found by reading that this game is one of the epic long-play RPGs, $5.00 was a good investment. Also, the extra markers (you did not mention markers, and I think you should) plus saving anywhere in the game is great! Not to mention the free 2,500 caps given away with each new game (this doesn’t mean each time you start to play but an actual new game).
I’d like to refine a few of your excellent points if I may.

Food: Definitely carry the ingredients for making stuff. I would say however, don’t carry more than 15-20 water, because you will be carrying things to help you boil water on journeys between areas.
Also, consider not carrying the ‘sauce pan’ *actually a pot!) but rather, carry several cans, as the weight difference versus durability is rather good. You can boil 50 water with one can! About 30 cans equal the weight of one sauce pan, and I have never run out of cans carrying only about 10, as you often find cans when scouring cities.
Try not to eat the can and jarred foods if possible. These are really useful for long journeys. My method is to carry about 12 of some grain and pasta, total. About 10 to 12 cans and about 15-12 water. One really good tip I found online was to boil condensed milk! As is, it gives you 75% hunger relief, but if you boil it, it jumps to 100% and it doesn’t spoil.
Another good idea is to carry a bunch of ‘rusks’ (dry twice-baked bread, like biscotti). They hardly weigh anything and give 5% hunger reduction.
I agree very much with working up your cooking skills early on, as it jumps to great stuff after awhile. The most useful later on will be salt meat recipes, as this food stuff will last nearly as long as canned food.

Scavenging: As you said, don’t carry around wood, as it weights you down unnecessarily. I do carry about four pieces for making torches so I can root around at night. When you get to the point of being able to make torches, do so very time! I promise you, if you don’t, the game is set up to cause you to fall and dislocate a leg or arm and it usually takes three days to heal after setting up with bandages. If you injure your right arm (no nods to ‘south paws’ in this game I am afraid!) you lose ability to do certain things, like crossbow for instance.
I read some posts online about game play later on, and a number of them advice to gather salt all the time, as it becomes very necessary later in the game to preserve meat, but to also cure animal hides for making armor and the like.
Things I generally don’t bother with collecting much are paper, tape, clothing and scrap (junk metal). You do need to carry around about 15-20 rags for torches (for torches you need gas, wood, rags). Every city and even villages mostly, will have at least one building with a cache of clothing. You can rip clothing, even boots, into rags.
A point I’d like to make about carrying stuff. I took the advice from a few people to build a motorcycle (after having a bicycle of course). I use the motorbike to carry a bike-cart combo and all food stuff and supplies for long distances between groups of settlements (when you zoom out on the map you will see clusters of settlements). Then I drop all my stuff, plus the motorbike, and only use the bike-cart setup to explore and scavenge cities and towns. If you do go this route, be sure to constantly gather fuel, machine oil, bicycle and motorbike parts. Transportation breaks down at a pretty good clip, so I usually repair anything before it hits 30%.
I quick point on replenishing certain things that you always use. There is a method for resetting the durability of certain things like gas masks and most importantly, the tool set. You will need to have two to make this work. It’s a bit convoluted to explain here, so I will give a link for it. Basically you leave one item at camp and carry one with you. When the one you are carrying gets close to 90% then you switch it for the one at camp. There’s a trick to it, so read the info from the link carefully:http://dayr.wikia.com/wiki/Beginners_Guide
(Go to the 3rd topic, “Martoss’s Guide to infinity. Read “Short version: Gask maks-example-dumbed down)

I am sure there were other things I meant to mention, but my head is swimming now; the game does that to me! When I read that the ‘moving city’ quest takes about a month to complete, I realized I was committed to this game!

Got problem here,radiation.cant find mask often.use sewing skill to make mask but its cant stand longer.bag also a problem for me,cause i m new,like 3day play,so cant find bag often.and yea,how did you guys makes alot of bottle cap?cant find it everywhere.
This game great btw,remind me at original fallout game.

I love this game I have free version as well and am finally thriving and about to build my first greenhouse there is so many different things to do and places to go I have been to most major cities bandit bases and survivor bases on the left half of map and that is only fraction of resources left in those areas. Good tip for people requiring fuel is to search roads in the cities and towns. I have learnt heaps of handy tips so hit me up

Level up your cooking and used stewed meats as food as they provide 100% food, 50% water and 5% exhaustion reductions, and can be crafted with any kind of meat except rotten, including radioactive meats.

You have to defeat the bandits at some of the large city-like camps to find spare parts for certain vehicles such as the KAMAZ, tank , and helicopter. The helicopter parts can be found at the second launch site in the retribution quest by defeating the bandits. The KAMAZ parts and tank parts can be found along the routes between survivor camps in some of the skull and crossbones camps